Buy a House and Get a Wife

And I'm not joking! When I first came across this I just couldn't believe it. Buy a house and get a free wife? Absolutely - no joke. Mind you there's plenty men out there who would be put off with such a deal. Buy a house and get a wife? Shocking! Disasterous! Cockeyed! Bonkers! Demented, even! I mean, who in their right mind would make the most important of life's investments - a house - only to be lumbered with a bird?

Let's get down to basics. The wife in question is - wait for it - Chinese. The problem is, many analysts are getting around to the realisation that perhaps the burgeoning Chinese economic bubble is just about to burst. The fact is, Chinese property developers blindly tried to emulate the construction boom of the Middle East without figuring who in Hell's nation was going to buy the properties. Let's face it, the Middle East Arabs are rich - Chinese bourgeoisie are not. So, in the light of this, some bright spark came up with a chef-d'oeuvre; give away a wife with the house!

Jin Tai Cheng, a Beijing company, is the company in question for prospective buyers of its Ecological Bay properties. The basic idea is that one would take a sales lady out on a date and, once you have bought your property, and if you decided to marry, the company will also give you 60,000 renminbi (RMB) (£5,600.00). The thing is, the company actually 'lured' the sales girls into the job with a promise of a wealthy husband. A senior company executive is on record as saying that the developer is not making money by selling apartments and decided to strike a deal with a local matchmaking agency to marry off these "unwanted" girls to rich husbands. In return, the developer would receive much more than RMB 60,000 for every girl they manage to "give away". This way, the girls wouldn't lose face by putting themselves on sale, the husbands don't lose face by going directly to an agency to look for a bride, and the developer makes a nice profit. Pretty cool, no?

As a postscript to this story, I further learned that, unlike the visage that accompanies this blog, the girls were said to be 'not very nice looking!'